Summary of “Having children is not life-affirming: it’s immoral”

Life is simply much worse than most people think, and there are powerful drives to affirm life even when life is terrible. A robust life of 90 years is much closer to 10 or 20 years than it is to a life of 10,000 or 20,000 years. If we are interested in the second question, we cannot answer it simply by noting that human life is as good as human life is, which is what employing human standards involves. If we are to say that somebody’s life is not worth continuing, the bad things in life do need to be sufficiently bad to override the interest in not dying. So the quality of a life must be worse in order for the life to be not worth continuing than it need be in order for it to be not worth starting. The difference between a life not worth starting and a life not worth continuing partly explains why anti-natalism does not imply either suicide or murder. If the quality of one’s life is still not bad enough to override one’s interest in not dying, then one’s life is still worth continuing, even though the current and future harms are sufficient to make it the case that one’s life was not worth starting. The confusion between starting a life and continuing a life is not the only way in which life-affirmation clouds people’s ability to see that life contains more bad than good.